Jerks, tweets and news

To me, the important question is not whether non-professional news reporting will be available or whether "jerks with cellphone" will run amok, but rather how we learn to handle that and incorporate it into the public newsstream.

The discussion seems worth more than evanescent 140-character exchanges. To keep the conversation going, I collected a little of the colloquy from an hour or so this morning, mainly between NYU's ay Rosen and me.

4 comments:

And I tried to point out -- for which Jay Rosen called me a 5th grader -- that this highlights the importance of professional journalists to have an even greater sense of their ethical role in journalism. We can play an ethical watchdog role, coaching, teaching and guiding people toward cit-j done right (curating, as they say these days) and doing what Carr did and point out when it goes bad.

Cit-J is a powerful tool, but it's non an unalloyed good.

Carr's post is a useful voice in the debate of where CitJ fits in the modern media landscape.

No, Howard. I said a debate about whether citizen journalism is an "unalloyed good" is worthy of a fifth grader.

It seems to me quite obvious to all who might participate in the debate you wish to have that practices such as citizen journalism and live Tweeting from events are an ambiguous good-- not automatically a gain, not mindlessly to be cheered, not to be instantly condemned or reflexively dismissed, either. That would be a grown up way of starting the discussion.

By this measure, I think Paul Carr's post is not for grown-ups. You think it's a good way to start to debate. We disagree on that, but not on the more essential points.

-30- I agree, of course, that there's no monopoly on news. And no monopoly on quality, either, in that many bloggers can do better stuff than many pros.

My concern is how we sort all this, what the filters are, how can we distinguish on-the-spot, instant eyewitness reporting from sensationalized bullshit ("They just brought in a cart of body transplant parts!!")

Our old, often flawed journalistic structure had been worked out over decades to compensate for that. We don't have any construct yet to handle today's new world.

About Howard

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